I've just published a blog post listing exciting new features in Debian 13, focusing on practical changes that can improve your workflow for better performance and productivity.

This is also useful for users of other distributions, as most of the features come from projects also packaged outside of Debian.

https://samueloph.dev/blog/debian-13-my-list-of-exciting-new-things/

@samueloph Wow, even Debian 1.1, that's amazing job done!

@billchenchina the things that make Debian special, great work by Tianon

@samueloph systemd soft-reboot, not systemctl?

@wolf480pl fixed, thank you!

@samueloph My favorites:
- HDR color support in Gnome
- GnuPG can use TPMs now

@erlenmayr I was tempted to list the HDR support, had it in the first draft, but I'm not sure it's working well with all apps yet.
I've tried to test it but something wasn't working, what's your experience with it?

And I didn't know about the gnupg one, thanks.

@samueloph Debian 12 was way behind with GnuPG. Now there are a lot of features at once with the update from GnuPG 2.2 to 2.4.

@erlenmayr as I understand the newer versions have compatibility issues, controversial deviations from the RFC, Trixie is patching a bunch of stuff for 2.4 and there seems to be a general movement towards migrating to sequoia-pgp now.

I've played with it but haven't migrated yet.

@samueloph Thanks for your article. Note that Debian 2.1 was called slink, not Slinky!

Also, for XFCE users: the annoying xfce4-panel bug that shows minuscule workspace thumbnails appears to be fixed... in unstable (workaround in trixie: right click, choose Properties then switch the Appearance away from and back to the value you want).

@blobster Fixed it, thank you!

@samueloph Very nice list.

I especially like the inclusion of the systemd soft reboot. That's gonna make some sysadmin work a lot easier.

@samueloph I think the RFC drama affects GnuPG 2.6. GnuPG 2.4 is already out and used for a long time by Ubuntu and others. Only Debian was late.

@samueloph
Thanks! Just did my first git reorganisation with lazygit 🙂

@samueloph

There are so many new features in #Debian 13 #trixie, that everyone finds sth. else that is amazing to them 🙂

E.g. with my software developer hat on, I'm most excited about #Emacs 30 with #eglot and some #LSP servers, e.g. #rustAnalyzer. (Unfortunately, no #JavaScript or #Typescript LS in Debian yet 😞.)

And regarding #Jabber/#XMPP, there are too many cool things to fit in 500 characters:

https://xmpp-team.pages.debian.net/blog/2025/05/xmpp-debian-13-trixie-news.html

@werdahias @samueloph

Never heard of #texlab.
Thanks for the hint!

https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/texlab

#TeXLaTeX #LSP

@werdahias @samueloph

Nowadays I don't write #TeXLaTeX directly anymore. I got used to #orgmode, which does, but almost hidden to me 🙂